'Tis better to have cried at work than to never have gone to work at all. Meabh Savage details her life as a professional crybaby.
“You can somehow speak really eloquently while crying at work!”
If I had to make an approximation, I’d say that I cry in about 10% of my meetings at work. There is truly nothing I can do about it—it’s just how I emote. When I am in any way frustrated, excited, or simply glad, I am prone to getting teary eyed in a conference room. When I am in any way inconvenienced, I can keep it together internally, but the valuable insights I have, which are grounded in sensible data, sound stuffy and sad with tears rolling down my face.
I’m also very much the same way at home. Have you ever seen that viral tweet, where a husband keeps a list of things that have made his wife cry lately? The listed items were completely random, like, she found out that swans could be gay, or that she put on her favourite jumper, or that she started thinking about the swans again. My reasons-for-crying-list wouldn’t be too far off. I’ve cried because I had so much laundry to do. I’ve cried because I thought about my dog for too long. I’ve cried watching WWE, Teen Mom, and a number of Korean dramas.
I want to take a moment to make sure I’m painting an accurate picture of myself here. Do I regularly bawl crying without notice? No. Do I blubber uncontrollably when someone makes eye contact with me? Also no. The tears of which I speak often appear as the sole indication of any emotion. Otherwise, more often than not, I can remain composed. One of the greatest compliments I’ve ever received is when a colleague of mine said,
“You can somehow speak really eloquently while crying at work!”
However sensible I can remain during these crying spells, I spent a long time resisting this fact about myself, and unsurprisingly, none of my endlessly quirky methods of solving the self-perceived issue worked. The closest I’ve ever come to substance abuse of any kind is when once, before a college presentation about dog adoption, I took twice as many Xanax tablets as I was directed (you know, from my prescribed blister packet of seven pills, meant to ward off panic attacks. Also for reference: - ‘twice as many’ equalled a grand total of two tablets). I was so worried that I’d start to cry about all the purebred, overly-breathy, squashed-nose bulldogs whose demand I so desperately wanted to reduce by my presentation, that risking my life (again, it was two tablets) was a better decision than emotionally raw-dogging the whole ordeal—pardon the pun. I tried to meditate my emotion away, my goal being a state of ‘I-don’t-give-a-shit’ that I was truly never built to ever reach. I’ve even been on a decade-long journey, my doctor in tow, trying to find the ideal antidepressant that would placate me to the point of never shedding a tear ever again.
Not only has this pursuit turned up fruitless, but really, it was never even a necessary endeavour. I got to a point in the journey where, after a long stint on a medication that left me feeling the way the finance section of a broadsheet newspaper looks, I was forced to ask myself why I wanted to live a life devoid of emotion. My focus went from trying to achieve the unachievable, to really considering whether or not the unachievable was desirable to me at all in the first place.
I had a wonderful therapist when I started attending counselling sessions whose words and advice have stuck with me throughout my twenties. During one particular session, I came into her office crying and deeply worried that I was, perhaps, abnormal to a previously unseen degree. The night before, I had seen Ezra Koenig and Karen O perform a song together onstage at the Oscars, and, inspired by my years-long love of Vampire Weekend and everything they ever did, I bawled crying into my mom’s shoulder. I asked my therapist if I was ever going to be ‘normal’, if I was ever going to chill out a bit, ever going to react “emotionally appropriately”.
I can remember even now how it felt when she looked at me with kind eyes, and said, “How wonderful is it that you can feel your emotions so deeply!?”.
Something I admire about my teenage self is how much love I had to give and how earnestly I looked for ways to give it. I poured my heart into my English essays, wrote short stories and poems and songs about my favourite bands, and painted anything and everything that sparked joy in my life. I used every last creative ability in my body to say “look how strongly I feel about the life I find around me”.
Why is it that I feel as though I cannot carry this version of myself with me through my career? At what point did I become ashamed of her? In some ways, I feel as though I long to be her again. She was passionate and fearless and brought her authentic, emotional self to every aspect of her life. She wrote songs about how much she loved her friends and attended church services diligently and lost herself night after night in novels, travel guides, song lyrics, and Tumblr blogs.
I think everything came apart when I started to think about one of the most complicated words in the English language: ‘appropriate’. With context clues, snide comments, and societal expectations, I came to understand that perhaps, a large portion of my personality was no longer appropriate once I left my teenage years. In the space of a few weeks, I went from being a child in a creative and nurturing school environment to being an eighteen-year-old adult working in a miserable department store, moving through the same motions day after day.
It was now, all of a sudden, no longer appropriate to be passionate, enthusiastic, and emotional. When once I could cry freely and openly with my classmates at the drop of a hat, I became painfully self-conscious of myself, and, in an attempt to fit in with my new, cooler, older colleagues, I became terrified of coming off obnoxious, fake, or over-the-top like the other employees we would gossip about.
By the time four years of college had chewed me up, dressed me in business casual, and spat me out, I was no longer able to compartmentalise my feelings. I started my copywriting career in the middle of one of the strictest lockdowns our country saw, and found myself sitting alone in my childhood bedroom for hours on end, feeling like a failure in the only job I’d ever dreamed of. It’s really no wonder I had such a tumultuous time with my feelings. Showing emotional vulnerability in your workplace is a brave and fearless decision, but I can truly take no credit for making it. I had designed myself in the hopes of becoming a responsible, reliable, and sensible robot, but somewhere there was a manufacturing error and I started to leak emotion everywhere. And because of this leak, I started to feel, in a word, stupid.
As I write this, I’m not sure that I really want to share the in-between of the journey I’ve been on. I’m in a wonderful place now, and I am very proud of myself for the work I’ve done to get here, but I don’t really like to think about how hard I was on myself for those years. I’m also not sure it’s really something I have to explain to you, dear reader, as so many of us have felt similarly due to our own personal circumstances— - I just felt really stupid. I felt like an adult who wasn’t good at being an adult. I felt like any time I got frustrated or upset at work, that I was embarrassing myself, and that I was making everyone around me uncomfortable.
And I don’t want to steer you wrong or give you an inaccurate impression of my worklife the past few years: while distress became the overarching theme of many (most) of my 1:1 meetings with my direct manager, I was a hoot in our team meetings. I’d make jokes, provide support, reach out to new hires to welcome them to our squad. To remind us again of the reality of the situation, I don’t cry 24/7 at every little thing - sometimes I can be cool, calm, and sophisticated. But sometimes, with people I felt comfortable with, I cried. The longer I was a member of the team, the more comfortable I felt with my colleagues, and before long, the list of people who had seen me emotionally vulnerable had reached lengths not previously seen. Once I realised what was happening, I started to feel so intensely stupid and naive, and, for a spell, started to hang back in the rafters of the office’s day-to-day productions.
This was, until, my manager at the time well and truly knocked some sense into me. At this point, I had worked directly with three managers at my company, all of whom were endlessly understanding and supportive. They all knew my intentions, they knew how close to the surface my emotions were, and they knew that I had it much more “together” than it ever looked. I shared with my manager that I was at a point where I really and truly felt as though the entire team, nay, the entire company, nay, the entire worldwide marketing industry thought I was a big fat crybaby. My manager sat me down and reminded me of the reality of the situation: while it had felt like more than this, really and truly, only three managers had ever seen me cry.
“Only you know what’s going on behind the curtain—the rest of the world sees a fraction of what goes on in your mind, and that fraction is even so much smaller than you will ever realise.”
This was so achingly obvious and somehow, so easy to miss. I really had only properly cried in front of about three managers. And at the end of the day, as my own manager pointed out in this very meeting, isn’t that part of their job?
Something else I had never considered was that, with everyone else, when I had cried and remained composed in every other way, no one else could hear the internal monologue of embarrassment and stress that went on. Everyone else saw me tearing up, listened to my still-sensible rhetoric, and moved on with their days.
A fact of life is that we bring our whole selves to work. Some people can compartmentalise, and that’s great, but sooner or later, your personal life will bleed into your professional, and vice versa. A manager who’s truly worth their salt is going to be ready and willing to provide you with support during these times, and to remind you that it’s completely acceptable to react to your work in an emotional way.
There’s no reality wherein I stop being intensely enthusiastic about what I do. This possibility just does not exist. I was like this when I stocked shelves, worked in a call centre, assigned people to registers, and I’ve been like this in my copywriting job. With that comes a lot of positive feelings, like, when a project runs smoothly, or when you get some really stellar feedback, but the flip side of the coin is that I can feel frustrated and disappointed when things aren’t dreamy and happy. As soon as I stopped willing the entire spectrum of my emotions to fuck off and leave me alone, I started to lean into my intensity and passion and interest to hone it and work with it, and I have never looked back.
If you and I are kindred spirits in this teary way, I’d love to share with you some of the things I’ve learned. The first is, it is infinitely invaluable to put energy and care into fostering positive, trusting relationships with one or two chosen colleagues. For the past few years, I have very intentionally worked at building trust with my managers, being open and honest with them about my work, my headspace, and any roadblocks I’m bumping into. Having one or two people in your office that you can pull aside for a cup of tea and encouraging, understanding chat will help so much. You could even start a Crying Club in your company. (This is a joke. But also, not really. I would 100% join a Crying Club in my workplace.)
Similarly, my second piece of advice would be to be honest about how you deal with your emotions, with yourself and with others. I have started countless meetings by telling my coworkers that, because of frustration or passion or enthusiasm, I am prone to tearing up, but I always try to assure them that it honestly has little to no bearing on how I’m actually doing mentally. I’ve told people before that if emotion can be measured on a scale out of 10, others might start crying at an 8 out of 10, whereas I start to tear up at a 2.
My last piece of advice is to check in with yourself regularly about how you’re getting on mentally and, in a way, be your own support system. I do believe that displays of emotion in the workplace should be normalised, but I don’t believe that we should be consistently burdening our colleagues with the responsibility of our own mental health. Everyone in their lives has gotten to a point where we’ve needed a bit more support from those around us, and that’s truly nothing to be worried or embarrassed about. It’s been very important to me in my career that I too can be supportive of my colleagues where they need help themselves, and a wonderful way to do that is to make sure I’m doing everything I can to keep mentally well myself.
I have been steeped in good fortune for so many years to have been able to work with the particular managers and colleagues that I have worked with so far. In many implicit and explicit ways, I have been given permission to be emotional, to make mistakes, to fix my mistakes, and to learn and grow from every situation that I’ve been in. Something I will be thankful for forever is that I was taught that it is up to me to give myself that permission moving forward. Showing emotion in professional spaces does not mean that you’re incapable of coping, incompetent at your job, or mentally weak. You’re honouring your authentic experience of the world, in and outside of your work life.
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